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St
Benedict, Horning

We
didn't go away in the summer of 2005. We'd
normally be heading off to some obscure part of
France, preferably the Jura, or at a pinch a
Greek island; but we had the house done up, and
any lingering hopes of continental sunshine
disappeared when, at very short notice, we needed
to buy a new car. The camshaft of the old one had
suddenly thrown itself up through the engine and
destroyed it; the RAC man actually had to stifle
a gasp when he saw what had happened.

I didn't
mind. I said we could go for days out. When I was
a child, my family were too poor to go on
holiday, and we didn't own a car, so being able
to go anywhere at all still seems a wonderful
thing to me.

But
Jacquie remembered a few family holidays in her
childhood, and the words 'days out' struck fear in her
heart; it was what her parents said when they were
planning to spend the summer decorating. I assured her
that I had no plans for this, and was actually quite
looking forward to days out, especially if a fair number
of them happened to be in Norfolk.

Our two
children, Jimmy (12) and Martha (8) were also quite
excited at the prospect of going out for the day lots of
times; and besides, being Catholics who have been
encouraged throughout their school days to martyr
themselves wherever possible, they were willing to give
up their suntans if they could get suffering credits for
it. In any case, Jimmy had a scout camp in prospect; as
it turned out, this would be the sunniest week of the
summer, and so it was that he set off for the Elveden
forest, and Jacquie and I and his little sister headed
off for a day on the Broads.

I
love the Norfolk Broads. There's something so
old-fashioned about them. They still have tea
shops called 'tea shoppes', and you can still buy
souvenirs like thermometers set in china dogs and
miniature brass gongs embossed with a map of the
Bure. There are still technicolor postcards of
Potter Heigham bridge printed in the 1960s, the
prices marked in old pennies. Everyone tells you
that the Broads are insufferably overcrowded, but
they aren't really. Wroxham and Hoveton shopping
centres are pretty full, mainly with fortnighters
from the north of England, and some of the main
waterways have snarl-ups like the Ipswich rush
hour, but most of the lanes and backwaters are
almost completely empty. We headed to the south
bank of the Bure, and bearing in mind that it was
the middle week of August we passed hardly
another car once we got north of South Walsham.

We climbed
Ranworth tower, and Martha had the frisson of seeing her
father get told off by another visitor for using a flash
to photograph the Ranworth screen, against the official
rules as printed on the very large sign (well, for
goodness sake - why don't they just say please don't
take photographs, buy our postcards instead? It
would be more honest), and then we went and had lunch at
the Woodbastwick brewery. I was very conscious that we
were only a couple of miles from one of the few Broadland
churches I hadn't visited. I suggested that, you know,
why didn't we just stroll down to the river and take the
foot ferry across to Horning?

Because
the ferry is shown on the Ordnance Survey map, I had
assumed that it would be some kind of major operation
with a ticket booth and possibly a bar; as it turned out,
there was a fading photocopied A4 sheet of paper stapled
to a stick, giving a mobile phone number to call if you
wanted to discuss the possibility of crossing. I was all
for giving up at this point, but Jacquie rang up and the
man said he'd be there in ten minutes.

And
he was. A little launch with an outboard motor
headed down the Bure from the direction of Potter
Heigham and reversed into the cutting. Another
family had joined us on the bank, and we all
piled in. Once seated, we headed back out
downriver, and then up to the boat yard at the
top of Horning creek. It was a lovely trip,
bobbing around in the wide, lazy river; it took
no more than ten minutes, and the nice man
charged us just a pound a head - and he charged
Martha nothing at all, saying she hadn't taken up
enough space.

Having made sure that the
ferry would be going back in about an hour's
time, we walked through sunny, blackberry-flanked
lanes up to Horning church, which is about a mile
outside the village. An English summer is always
tentative, but this day felt like it really meant
it, a bright, airy light beating down, bringing
out the smell of the blackberries, and the
tarmac, and high birdsong in the fields around.

The first
sight of St Benedict is from the north, and it is a
curious one. Having explored Suffolk, I am used to big
old churches that have been made smaller by having their
aisles demolished, and new walls built into the arcade.
But this is less common in Norfolk, and so when I saw the
bones of the arcade in the rendered north wall of the
church, it was like greeting an old friend. It is
especially fetching here with the clerestory outlined in
the rendering above, the rendering itself being offset
nicely by the flint of the tower and the chancel.

We headed
round west of the tower to the south side, and here the
view was much more conventionally East Anglian, with an
aisle as well as a clerestory. Both have militantly Tudor
windows, those in the clerestory being set in render, so
there must have been a big project on here right on the
eve of the Reformation.

I
knew that the church would be open, because this
is the Broads, and virtually all Broadland
churches are open (and thus serve as a lesson to
more neanderthal parts of the county like the
Yarmouth area and the Waveney valley). We stepped
inside, out of the brightness of the day into a
long, dim tunnel of a church, leavened by the
clerestory and the south aisle, but nonetheless
rather gloomy.

The north arcade survives
more fully on the inside, the capitals and
columns all still in place. The tiling, carpets
and darkly varnished woodwork are exactly as the
Victorians intended; a scale model of nearby St
Bene't's abbey reminds us that this place had a
medieval life as well.

The tower
arch soars, another reminder of medieval glories, as is
the font. A 1598 brass inscription has been set on the
back of the wall, and is bizarrely decorated with a union
flag. But the chancel is again broodingly Victorian, full
of dark wood, tiles and carpet. And yet... I was struck
by the stalls, which are carved in ogee-arched niches on
the ends with all manner of wonderful things. The devil
pushes a man down into hell, another man fights with a
dragon - can these things really be medieval, or are they
19th century conceits? In a way, it was fun not knowing.

Outside
again, we wondered at the 13th century dog-toothed arch
to the priest door, which must be part of the earlier
church. And then we wandered back down the lanes, gorging
ourselves on Norfolk blackberries, in time to cross the
Bure and head to the hell of the souvenir shops in
Wroxham, to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of the
day.